Inventing
problems with women's (and now men's) bodies and offering a 'cure' fuels the
multi-billion dollar beauty industry.
By Jill Filipovic
 |
Photograph: Louie Psihoyos/Corbi
Scent testers researching deodorant in Cincinnati, Ohio. |
Ladies, I have some good news
and I have some bad news. The first piece of good news is that I will never
again begin a column with the word "ladies" because typing that
opener makes me cringe at the thought of one too many all-female email threads
organizing Sunday brunches, Girls-watching marathons and bachelorette parties.
The second piece of good news is that American Apparel and Cameron Diaz say you
can stop waxing all your pubic hair off.
The bad news: you need to start deodorizing under your boobs.
A
hint: it's usually Choice B. Luckily, the manufacturer of boob deodorant made
this latest one easy.
The bad news: you need to start deodorizing under your boobs.
I
can already hear your objections: "But the area under my boobs doesn't
stink!" or "What kind of marketing genius not only came up with the
term 'swoob,' but actually thought half the world's population might be dumb
enough to buy into it?" or simply, "This is a dumb product aimed at
inventing an insecurity and then claiming to cure it."
You
would be correct on all three points.
In
fact, inventing problems with women's bodies and then offering a cure – if you
pay up – is the primary purpose of the multi-billion dollar beauty industry.
More than 20 years ago, Naomi Wolf wrote The Beauty Myth challenging that exact
phenomenon. Since then, the industry has only gotten bigger, and the range of
made-up problems women need to "cure" only wider. Women spend $426bn
every year on beauty products, paying $151bn more in fees and mark-ups than men
for the same products – and that's not including the $10bn Americans spend on
plastic surgery.
Poke
around and you'll find a laundry list of painful-sounding or bizarre
procedures, from labia trimming to anal bleaching to freezing your facial
muscles with poison to prevent wrinkles. But even relatively benign and basic
beauty upkeep would look awfully strange to an alien landing in the middle of
New York:
The
women wear shoes that are pointy and unstable and make it impossible to walk,
and they rip out hair from everywhere but their heads but then they paint extra
hair on their eyes, and they turn their fingernails colors found nowhere in
nature, and they paint their lips impossible shades of red and pink and orange,
and they draw lines around their eyelids and put color on top, and they try to
make their whole bodies skinny except their butts and their boobs, which they
sometimes fill with gelatinous sacks.
We
are an incredibly strange species.
Of
course, human beings throughout history have altered their appearance, to
indicate membership in a group, to denote status or to appear attractive. What
counts as "attractive" may vary wildly across cultures and traditions,
but the pursuit of beauty is important to many human beings in many different
societies around the world. An interest in the aesthetic isn't weakness or
vanity. It's the foundation of art, of design, of architecture, of many of any
given culture's most treasured developments. It's not shallow or frivolous for
women and men to interest ourselves in our own personal aesthetic, devoting
time and care to how we look. There can be an art in dressing and doing your
hair and make up, not to mention a female-centric passing down of traditions
and practices. Lipstick alone is not propping up the patriarchy.
But
socially obliging women as a class to present in a certain way that
necessitates the expenditure of time, money and effort is.
No
one is legally required to shave their legs, blow dry their hair, get a facial
or wear lipstick. But if you don't wear make up, you can be fired for it, and
many employers have dress codes that require a full-done-up face. If you're a
black woman and you wear your hair natural or in braids, you might be fired as
well, or informed that your look isn't "professional" – even if
you're not a woman at all, but a little girl.
And
don't get to thinking that striving for attractiveness will solve your
problems. Employers can fire you for that, too.
Beauty
also pays you back. Beautiful women (and men) earn much more than their
average-looking or unattractive counterparts. But beauty, especially for women,
isn't so much inborn as an achievement. That truth is simplified in the teen
movie trope of the nerdy girl transforming into a babe by whipping off her
glasses and shaking her hair out of its ponytail, but the fact is that beauty
is about a whole lot more than just genes – it's not just that it can be bought
and paid for, it's that it usually has to be.
Yes,
there are the lucky few who were born looking like our particular cultural
ideal, but there are many more who are able to pay to come close. Think
investments like braces to fix crooked teeth, whitening to fix a yellowed smile,
dermatology for flawless skin, gym memberships and trainers and pricey healthy
diets for a toned body, a skilled hairdresser and colorist for lovely hair,
manicures and pedicures, well-made and well-tailored on-trend clothing, good
make up and someone to teach you how to apply it, not to mention the luxury of
time for daily workouts, careful shopping and the necessary beauty
appointments.
You
don't have to be rich to look great. But it sure does help.
That's
because many of the ways we look "great" are about projecting a
particular class status and social tribe. Sometimes it's about being in the
know about trends or ways of wearing particular items; sometimes it's just
about signaling wealth; sometimes it's about indicating that you probably also
live in a particular kind of neighborhood and enjoy a particular kind of book
and listen to a particular kind of music. But women stand on ever-shifting
grounds of "appropriate" physical presentation, and we're pulled by
what we enjoy, what we want to signify, and what we're supposed to exhibit.
All
of that costs us money and time. It's never about finally being beautiful and
getting to just exist as a pretty person. It's about achieving beauty. It's a
series of efforts and improvements and rituals, and ongoing work of beautifying
yourself. There's always something else that could be improved or fixed.
And
when we live in a society where people make enormous sums of money selling
unnecessary things to other people, you can bet that the stakes of
acceptability continually get higher. I know very few women my age, for
example, who have never gotten a bikini wax. My mom knows very few who have.
I've never asked her, but I'm fairly confident I know more men who have groomed
their body hair or purchased expensive hair and face products than my mom does,
because in the past decade or so the beauty industry has identified men as a
massive untapped market.
Yet
I still know plenty of men whose beauty routine involves little more than a
Gillette razor, deodorant and a comb; I know close to zero women who use so few
beauty products. The little things add up: the extra minutes in the bathroom in
the morning instead of at work, the niggling insecurities that eat away at your
brain space and your self-esteem, the understanding that your existence on this
earth requires putting yourself on physical display.
Beauty
culture can be a lot of fun, and I'm not immune to it. Sephora knows I own
enough lipstick for a bus full of human women. It's also a major burden. And
when industries are so transparently trying to stoke our insecurities in order
to get us to buy more stuff, our ears should perk up a little bit and we should
ask: is this about the fun in playing with the aesthetics of our physical
bodies? Or is this someone trying to get me to buy a thing by convincing me
that something is terribly, embarrassingly wrong with my body?
